MANA was founded in 2013 by Valami Qoro, Jimmy Noa, Nicola Fa’avale and Andrew Fa'avale who were working with Pasifika young offenders at the time.
Realising that there was a lack of culturally-appropriate and strengths-based approaches to working with Pasifika peoples, they created MANA as a vehicle to fill the evidence-gap that existed in the Australian context, and to design culturally-nuanced and holistic strategies and frameworks to work within.